The primary markets for geospatial solutions for Bentley software appear to be utilities and civil. As the data that can be put into a building information model becomes more complex and analytical, the need to incorporate some level of analytics and spatial information becomes greater.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a visualization by The New York Times:

“The space of electoral college calculators is fairly well-trodden, so at first it seemed hard to do something new. The big problem here is the combinatorial explosion (2^n): even if you consider only nine states, you have 512 possible outcomes! So, you don’t offer much insight by simply enumerating outcomes or allowing undirected exploration. The challenge is to preserve minute details (micro) while providing an effective visual summary (macro).

We settled on a binary tree early on, but it wasn’t until Shan had the idea of collapsing parts of the tree into “decision” nodes that the design clicked. By pruning subtrees below the 270-vote threshold, you reduce the complexity substantially. More importantly, you get a much faster sense of what matters: who wins! And from there it was “just” a matter of implementation and refinement.

The Superstom Sandy arrived at an inopportune time (not that there is an opportune time) that affected voter turnout in the 2012 US presidential election. Esri has created a map that explores precinct-level data from the 2008 election overlaid on FEMA impact zones for the disaster. Darker shaded counties indicate areas that were most damaged by the storm.

Among the predictions made for Hurricane Sandy, CoreLogic released data showing potential exposure to residential property damage from hurricane-driven storm-surge flooding as Hurricane Sandy makes its way toward the U.S. Atlantic Coast.

“Based on current forecasts, Sandy is likely to make landfall along the northeastern Atlantic coast early Monday,” said Dr. Howard Botts, vice president and director of database development for CoreLogic Spatial Solutions. “Though it is still early and the projected path is constantly changing, Sandy could pose an enormous threat to major metropolitan areas in the Northeast, like New York City and Long Island, Atlantic City and Baltimore.”

The data shows more than 261,000 total residential properties valued at over $80 billion at risk for potential storm-surge damage among the coastal Mid-Atlantic states, assuming the storm hits the coast as a Category 1 hurricane. Within that region, more than 210,000 total properties valued at over $67 billion stand at risk in five major metro areas from Virginia to New York.

Spirent Communications, a leader in testing wireless networks, services and devices, recently announced immediate availability of the first commercialized test solution for LTE assisted GPS (A-GPS) Over-The Air (OTA) Testing. This is a co-development effort by Spirent and ETS-Lindgren, two leaders in location testing.

Brock Butler, Director of Wireless Location Technology for Spirent Communications was interviewed by GISCafe Voice about this important announcement:1) What is LTE assisted GPS and why is it important?

Long Term Evolution (LTE), often called 4G, technology is being incorporated into many next-generation consumer devices, including smartphones. It enables voice and high speed wireless data services. Nearly all consumer devices migrating to LTE also have a strong need to provide positioning capabilities. The leading technology for positioning remains Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) such as GPS (United States satellite system) or GLONASS (Russian satellite system). Assisted GNSS (e.g. A-GPS) uses an assistance server to provide satellite information to the mobile device and when coupled to a cellular technology like LTE, A-GNSS can provide improved location performance by making position fixes faster particularly at the very low power levels often associated with consumer usage in urban and indoor environments.

Esri announced today that Geoloqi, a next-generation location-based services (LBS) platform, will “merge its staff and product capabilities into Esri’s existing geospatial platform and launch a new Esri Research and Development (R&D) Center in Portland, Oregon, where Geoloqi is headquartered. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.”

Geoloqi enables rapid development of cross-platform, geography based applications utilizing a single API in any development language. Also they have good relationships with the developer community already that will complement Esri’s ArcGIS product suite to boost the companys mobile and web offerings. Additionally, Geoloqi provides algorithms designed to help preserve battery life while battery intensive location runs in the background or at prescribed intervals.